page_title: Canadian National Railway
section_title: Other incidents
hierarchical_section_title: Canadian National Railway / CN today / Controversies / Other incidents
caption_attribution_description: CN_67402
context_page_description: The Canadian National Railway is a Canadian Class I freight railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, that serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States.
  CN is Canada's largest railway, in terms of both revenue and the physical size of its rail network, spanning Canada from the Atlantic coast in Nova Scotia to the Pacific coast in British Columbia across about 20,400 route miles of track. In the late 20th century, it gained extensive capacity in the United States by taking over such railroads as the Illinois Central.
  CN is a public company with 24,000 employees, and as of July 2019 it had a market cap of approximately CA$90 billion. CN was government-owned, having been a Canadian Crown corporation from its founding to its privatization in 1995. As of 2019, Bill Gates is the largest single shareholder of CN stock.
  The railway was referred to as "Canadian National Railways" between 1919 and 1960.
context_section_description: Controversy arose again in Canadian political circles in 2003 following the company's decision to refer solely to its acronym "CN" and not "Canadian National", a move some interpret as being an attempt to distance the company from references to "Canada". Canada's Minister of Transport at the time called this policy move "obscene" after nationalists noted it could be argued the company is no longer Canadian, being primarily owned by American stockholders. The controversy is somewhat tempered by the fact a majority of large corporations are being increasingly referred to by acronyms.
  The residents of Wabamun Lake, in Alberta, staged a blockade of CN tracks in August 2005, when they were unsatisfied with the railway's response to a derailment catastrophe that spilled over 700,000 Litres of tarry fuel oil and about 80,000 L of carcinogenic pole treatment oil into the lake. Reporters found pre-spill evidence. CN executives admitted CN failed to provide public safety information to prevent public exposure to carcinogenic, toxic chemicals. The tar-like oil and chemicals killed over 500 large migratory birds, animals, fish and other aquatic life.
  In the years following CN's 1998 acquisition of Illinois Central, the company has come under scrutiny for illicit practices that allegedly cause the delay of Amtrak schedules. In 2012, Amtrak filed a formal complaint against CN with the Surface Transportation Board, stating that the prioritization of freight traffic over passenger traffic was commonplace on Amtrak routes operating on CN lines. The complaint cited over 4,000 delays during fiscal year 2011 on the route between Chicago and Carbondale, totaling over 26 days of net wasted schedule time; it also reported 99% of delays between Chicago and New Orleans on the City of New Orleans route were caused by CN dispatching issues. In 2018, Amtrak began issuing public report cards, grading the impact of freight railroads on passenger train performance. CN received the lowest-possible grade of "F" on the first card issued in March 2018.
caption: The "CN North America" logo. This was used from 1993–95, before the company returned to the plain "CN" logo, which is still in use.
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